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Stiffs

Mel Brooks and Edward Albee on monsters and madmen.

Megan Mullally, Shuler Hensley, and Mel Brooks take an all-singing, all-dancing, all-mugging look at the Frankenstein story.Credit ROBERT RISKO

“I went into show business to make a noise, to pronounce myself,” Mel Brooks told Kenneth Tynan in 1977. “I want to go on making the loudest noise to the most people.” In “Young Frankenstein” (at the Hilton)—the new Broadway musical version of Brooks’s 1974 film, co-written with Gene Wilder, which spoofed both Mary Shelley’s novel and the gothic genre—Brooks pronounces away (he is listed five times on the poster), and he certainly makes a lot of noise. The original “Frankenstein” was the result of a literary challenge: Lord Byron proposed a contest to see who could produce the scariest story to pass a rainy summer in Switzerland in 1816. “Young Frankenstein” is a response to a commercial challenge: can Brooks surpass the astronomical revenues of his last show, “The Producers,” which grossed more than half a billion dollars worldwide? But, although there is plenty of electricity in the air at “Young Frankenstein,” lightning doesn’t strike twice. With its slack plot and its inflated production numbers, the show transforms a tale of romantic agony into a theatrical agony.

“Young Frankenstein” is, like the labor of its scientist hero, Frederick Frankenstein, an “experiment in reanimation.” But those who live by the film-into-musical formula also die by it. The show, whose scenery and gags are often quotations from the movie, is haunted by the model it seeks to adapt. The ghosts of Gene Wilder, Teri Garr, Cloris Leachman, Marty Feldman, Madeline Kahn, and Peter Boyle shadow the musical’s hardworking actors. Roger Bart, as Frederick, is noisy but unnuanced, lacking Wilder’s crotchety vulnerability. Sutton Foster, as Inga, his Bavarian booty call, has a leggy charm but generates no real comic chemistry with her bellowing leading man. Only Andrea Martin, as Frau Blucher, the housekeeper and lover of the late Victor von Frankenstein (“He vas my boyfriend”), manages to stamp her droll personality and her sense of timing on the hectic proceedings; Martin has been dealt a low narrative hand, but she turns it into a full house. Otherwise, this all-singing, all-dancing, all-mugging production is a semaphore not of life but of drowning; the performers are swallowed up by the cavernous holes in the script (by Brooks and Thomas Meehan), and the generic songs (by Brooks) add nothing to the satire or to the momentum of the show.

These are hard words to write. We need more of the antic on Broadway, and Brooks is an expert at taking liberties. The pinwheeling freedom of his humor can create an atmosphere of wild exhilaration; even at his silliest, he is loved by audiences for his desperate desire to banish their troubles. How else can you explain theatregoers’ acceptance of corny gags in “Young Frankenstein” that would be booed off the stage at any amateur comedy slam? When Frederick travels to Europe to inherit his grandfather’s cliff-top castle, for instance, he gets off a train and says to a shoeshine man, “Pardon me, boy, is this the Transylvania Station?” “Ja, ja,” the man replies. “Track 29. Can I give you a shine?” When Frederick arrives at the castle, raps on the behemoth door with a fixture that resembles a gymnast’s rings, and says, “Wow, what knockers!,” Inga replies, “Oh, sank you, Doctor.” These burlesque gags are like paper fed to a fire: they add to the flame without giving off much heat.

Brooks takes the Roman-candle approach to comedy. He produces a lot of sparks; some fizzle and some fly. At least twice in this exhausting show, his shtick spirals into almost visionary nuttiness. The song “Roll in the Hay,” during which Frederick canoodles with Inga in the back of a wagon driven by two pantomime horses, is a wonderful production number that improves on the film. Here, Susan Stroman, who is the show’s director and choreographer, provides some innovation. As Inga yodels with pleasure—a sidesplitting bit of idiocy—Stroman creates the illusion of movement: trees roll by and the heads of the bobbing horses keep time with the bouncing protagonists. By contrast, the scene in which Frederick and the Monster (the affecting Shuler Hensley), in top hat and tails, perform Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz”—which was inspired in the movie—has become the musical’s eleven-o’clock number and is expanded to the point of trivialization. On the Brooksian principle that more is more, Stroman throws every possible choreographic and cinematic trope at the song—a shadow dance, strobe lights, risers, virtually the entire cast. The number wins the battle but loses the war; its success only emphasizes the longueurs that surround it.

Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” begins with an epigraph from “Paradise Lost”: “Did I solicit thee / From darkness to promote me?” To Milton’s question, “Young Frankenstein” answers with a loud “fuckin’ A!” Comedy turns aggression into delight; Brooks is a kind of tummler who wants to put it to the audience, and this priapic ambition always comes out in his work. Brooks’s monster doesn’t kill Frankenstein’s fiancée, Elizabeth (Megan Mullally); instead, he shags her in a cave. “Woof!” Elizabeth cries out—Broadway’s version of a wolf whistle—before emerging from the cave to sing “Deep Love,” a hymn to the Monster’s “long love / incredibly long love.” Inevitably, the Monster’s “enormous schwanz-stucker” ends up, through an act of scientific transference, belonging to the good doctor, and Inga has her own chance to bark at the moon. This is Brooks’s last laugh on the characters; ironically, however, it is also the last laugh on the show, which for all its huffing and puffing just can’t get it up.

While Brooks’s Dr. Frankenstein gets the most sensational penis enlargement in history, Peter, the bland, contented forty-something textbook publisher in Edward Albee’s “Peter and Jerry” (under the direction of Pam MacKinnon, at the Second Stage), is plagued by the opposite problem: “My penis seems to be . . . retreating,” he says. In this eloquent play, which combines Albee’s 1958 début one-act, “The Zoo Story,” with “Homelife,” a one-act prequel that he wrote in 2003, Albee extends his original provocative meditation on sexuality and solitude to include an examination of the manicured lawn of Peter’s domestic desires. Peter (Bill Pullman), whose wife, Ann (Johanna Day), affectionately calls him Mr. Circumspection, lives a life that is as smooth-surfaced as the modern Danish furniture that fills his apartment. He has two children, two cats, two parakeets. (“God, I love symmetry,” he exclaims at one point.) By all accounts, the marriage has been a happy one, “a smooth voyage on a safe ship,” as he describes it to Ann. Nonetheless, Ann, in the course of a comradely heart-to-heart, lets it be known that she hankers for more of the animalistic in her life—for violent, tumultuous sex. But, she adds, “that’s not your makeup—not in you.” Peter is all Apollonian, and Ann hankers for a little more of the Dionysian in their well-ordered house.

Peter owes his eerie calm to his ability to cut himself off from life. At the opening of the play, he sits reading and doesn’t at first hear his wife’s questions or even register her presence; when he’s reading, he explains, he goes into a trance. But that trance seems to continue when he puts his book down; in his daily life, he can’t access either his anger or his passion. When his wife tells him, without rancor, that he’s “good at making love . . . but . . . lousy at fucking,” he is too buttoned up to show any distress. He confesses to having participated in an incident at a college orgy in which he was “very bad.” “It was real exciting, and disgusting, and it turned me on in an awful way,” he says, blind to the chaos of his own polymorphous perversity. What Albee is trying to flush out into the open here is the elusive way in which the unconscious can short-circuit desire. As Peter sets off for a walk in Central Park, Ann calls out, “Don’t take any wooden nickels.” The phrase is a reminder to the country bumpkin to stay alert, to keep his eyes open. But Peter, who is more or less sleepwalking, misses the point. “Don’t take any what?” he says.

At the Park, which is where the original “Zoo Story” begins, he encounters a “permanent transient” named Jerry (Dallas Roberts), who embodies all the danger and the turmoil and the sadistic excitement that Peter has banished from his life. Jerry exists in a terrible isolation. “Have I been walking north?” he asks; literally and figuratively, he has lost his bearings. He has just been to the zoo, a visit that has confirmed both his sense of being caged and his sense that the rest of humanity is divorced from the animal instincts that possess and obsess him. Peter and Jerry’s conversation is dominated by Jerry’s long story of a ferocious dog at his boarding house—“malevolence with an erection”—which he tried first to appease, then to poison, before reaching a kind of stalemate, in which he and the dog “neither love nor hurt because we do not try to reach each other.”

Jerry wants to die, and he has chosen Peter to kill him. He provokes a fight, giving him a knife, taunting him to “fight for your manhood, you pathetic little vegetable.” For a split second in this violent encounter, Peter is excited. (The stage direction reads, “Jerry impaled on the knife at the end of Peter’s still firm arm.”) “You’re an animal. You’re an animal, too,” Jerry crows, as he lies dying. Jerry’s gesture—and Albee’s accomplishment—is to force Peter to face his own murderous feelings and the anarchy of desire. ♦